organizers if I might be allowed to attend the Congress and received a polite message that it was restricted to Party members, but that if I paid 60 cents and became a member I would be admitted. When I arrived at the Party offices to pay my 60 cents it was eventually decided, with great seriousness, that I could not be a bona fide member. The Congress took place and by a series of manœuvres the 'moderates' took over power. That week, and subsequently, two weekly papers appeared, each called Thunder and each claiming to be the ‘Organ of the People's Progressive Party'. The Jagan Thunder contained a furious attack on the Burnhamites for betraying the antiimperialist and anti-capitalist cause, and on the British Government for its tactics of seduction. It quoted the Robertson Report as the first cause of the split, when it said,

'We had no doubt that the Socialists in the P.P.P. were essentially democrats, and that left to themselves, their preference at all times would have been that the Party should pursue its constitutional objectives by straightforward and peaceful means. We doubt, however, if they had the wit to see the essential difference between themselves and their Communist colleagues or the ability to avoid being outmanoeuvred by them.'

In spite of the appearance of a genuine split observers still were not convinced. The Burnhamites knew that the political power of the P.P.P. lay in its opposition to colonialism, and if they did in fact betray this platform they would lose the mass support of people who have been bemused by the Party's promises. So, on February 26th, Burnham's Thunder said that the Party's policy was

'to further the cause of Guianese liberation at all levels.... Not only workers but also farmers, especially the small ones, and our so-called middle-class feel the pressure which is now being exerted by those who own this outpost of the "magnificent" British Empire. Insults, injustice and hypocrisy are the order of the day.... The situation is one which shows that every Guianese has an interest in ridding our country of the foreign yoke.'

It did not appear that Burnham was a reformed character, and an editorial in Jagan's Thunder for the same day seemed to suggest that the Jaganites and the Burnhamites had had some discussion to prevent panic among the Party's followers. 'It is true of course', said the editorial,

'that any split in the leadership of a political party will always be attended by confusion. But this should be confusion not of basic principles, not of long term aims, but only of questions of organization, of local issues and day to day activities. For the truth of the whole matter is this; no matter whether the Party breaks into two or two hundred pieces, the fact remains that we are still a colonial people, still human beings living at the mercy of the imperialist ruler. The imperialists never depart from reality when they attack us. Can we in our confusion depart from reality and be licked? Let us catch ourselves quickly, stop reeling about like drunken men and face the truth of our colonial status, our need for light in these hours of darkness and confusion. The road is clear-surrender or fight!'

It was against this background that I visited Mr. Burnham and Dr. Jagan. Mr. Burnham is a leading Georgetown barrister, and I saw him in his chambers, a dilapidated wooden shack in the traditional manner of law offices in the town. He was a tall, handsome man of thirty-two, wearing gaberdine drapes and a bow-tie, with restless, tortured eyes set in strongly Coptic features. He received me with no attempt at cordiality, but as we talked he relaxed and his antagonism began to melt. He read law at London University after becoming the 'Guiana Scholar' for 1942, and it is said that his intense hatred of Britain and the British is based on the colour discrimination he received while he was in London. He is a town man and his hatred of Sugar does not have the same root as Jagan's, being an extension of his violent anti-imperialism. But he speaks, in private, quietly and unemotionally. British Guiana, he told me, was exploited by the British, all the good jobs were kept for Englishmen and the native was deliberately kept uneducated so that he could be exploited. He agreed with me that there was now a 'new look' to colonialism, but he believed that, it was merely the old system with a hypocritical façade. He accused the British Government of deliberately fostering bad relations between Africans and East Indians in an attempt to divide and rule, and denied that there were any racial differences in the country or that the split in the Party had had anything to do with race. For him the reason for the split was that there was too little emphasis on the national struggle in Bol the Colony because the issue of Communism had blurred everything. 'Communism is irrelevant to British Guiana at toto this stage,' he said, 'it's something only an independent country

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can think about. In British Guiana it's simply a matter of getting power and I don't see this coming for ten or fifteen years.' I asked him what his politics were he had been called 'the ambiguous Mr. Burnham' in the Robertson Report. He smiled and said he had sympathy with some Marxist ideas and was against others. ‘Anyway,' he said, 'the Communist fear was always irrelevant. The U.K. Government seized on it as an excuse because you can do anything to a Communist, but they

A market stall

knew it wasn't the crux of the matter. The real crux-was the threat to their vested interests here.' 'So you agree there was a threat?' I asked, and he looked sharply at me before agreeing. The Jaganites, he went on, brought up too many issues foreign to the main struggle he wanted a greater concern with immediate issues and to unite all groups in the one great aim. When I said that a split in order to gain unity was a paradox he said that he was willing to sacrifice party unity in order to achieve a deeper and more real unity of the progressive elements. I asked him if the Jaganites were thinking in a similar way and

he said that that remained to be seen. He knew that it was said the split was a pandering to the Robertson Report, but that was not so. They had all hoped that open disagreement could he avoided but that had not proved possible.

Burn ham

He went on to attack the Sugar interests according to the orthodox-Party view. When the Party regained power, he said, s they would not nationalize sugar. The Sugar Producers Association would be allowed to remain-but on terms which they would have to accept. In any case, he assured me, the future of the Colony was not in sugar, but in rice and paper which would be made from rice-husks. In spite of this assurance that Sugar would be allowed to continue unmolested, he told me that. Bookers and the P.P.P. could not exist together. 'All colonial freedom', he told me, 'everywhere has always been gained be-/ cause Great Britain simply couldn't hold the territory any longer. The same will happen here.'

Nothing that he said seemed to suggest that he was building himself up as a man who could be trusted by the British. It seemed more and more certain that the split was genuine and was not concerned with the basic aims of the Party. I hoped that my meeting with Dr. Jagan would throw light on the motives of the Party.

Dr. Jagan is a successful dentist and, after I had been reading Thunder for some time in his waiting-room, he received me in his surgery. Honkytonk music came from the flat above as he flashed his celebrated smile at me from beneath a large coloured photograph of Stalin. He is a good-looking man with considerable charm of manner and a quickness of mind, almost a glibness, which is absent in the more tortuous Burnham. He admitted to me quite frankly that he was a Marxist—it is said that he was politically educated in Chicago by his wife, who was an enthusiastic worker on behalf of the Communist cause. Existing conditions in the Colony, he told me, made the practice of orthodox Marxism impracticable, but when the Party regained power he would look upon a Marxist state as his goal. He would accept the existing economic system in the Colony according to his own terms; the imperialist exploiters would have to accept what the Party decided. With swift, smooth and excitable speech he outlined his policies.

T

and his viewpoint differed essentially from Burnham's in very little. He spoke frankly about the reasons for Burnham's bringing about the split in the P.P.P

After the first doubt it was eventually decided in Georgetown that the split was genuine, but no approach was made to Mr. Burnham by the Governor, and none was received from him. Then, three months after the split, Burnham announced that he was to apply for permission to leave Georgetown2; he intended to raise money to come to Britain so that he might lay the Guianese case for a new Constitution and free elections before the Colonial Office.

*

The history of the P.P.P. is important and instructive in appraising British Guiana today. In 1950 the British Labour Government decided that it was time British Guiana reached the comparative political maturity of Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados, whose Constitutions allowed universal adult suffrage and a system of government by West Indian ministers. The Waddington Commission was appointed (see p. 46) to advise on a new Constitution. The three members of the Commission knew that their task was made difficult by the growing influence of the P.P.P. whose leaders were known to be good organizers, energetic and in some cases-Communist. Since no other organized or effective political party existed in the Colony the Commission had to face the fact that with universal

His remarks were similar to those expressed in an important address which Dr. Jagan delivered to a P.P.P. congress in Georgetown in the autumn of 1956: To understand the P.P.P. split is to understand the forces supporting and operating behind Burnham. Burnham's background is essentially middleclass. It is essentially this middle-class which is the prime force behind-the Burnham faction. One of the main characteristics of this "middle-class" is its opportunisms, its tack-and-turn, its vacillations to put itself always in the best position in order to get the greatest possible gains.' He claims that this middleclass saw the period of marking time and no elections' as ‘a barrier to the fulfilment of their ambitions of climbing to the top rungs of the Civil Service ladder,' and says that these were the considerations and pressures (election and the prestige and spoils of office) which forced the Burnham faction to try to take over illegally the machinery of the P.P.P., failing which to split from the P.P.P.'

2 P.P.P. leaders had been restricted to their home districts since the Suspension.